[ale] Serial consoles

[byron at cc.gatech.edu (Byron A Jeff)]

> 
> On Fri, 17 Jan 1997, Byron A Jeff wrote:
> 
> > There's a patch. Do this: goto deja news and search for NFS swap for linux.
> > a recent posting talks about it and gives an FTP site. On that FTP site
> > there is also a kernel patch for serial boot messages.
> 
> According to inside sources, this should be in the main kernel tree RSN.
> 
> > Well my personal opinion is that it's more effective to put a cheap (like
> > monochome, Hercules, or CGA) monitor and keyboard because there are too
> > many possible failure modes on both hardware and booting to trust the serial
> > port.
> 
> Bzzt, try again.  Imagine you are, say, an Internet Service Provider.
> Imagine further that you have to fit all of your equipment into a very
> small space.  Imagine that this space is remote from your main office.
> Imagine finally that you have many servers to fit in this site.

Todd, remember that I pointed out that once you have a stable system that
the monitor and keyboard can be removed from the server, giving exactly
the same footprint (i.e. headless)

I was just pointing out that in the instance of hardware failure it's a
whole lot easier to attach a keyboard and monitor, then to have to open
up a machine to drop in a video card. And if the machine doesn't boot then
the serial console isn't of much use anyway, is it?

> 
> The important part is not the space requirement, although that helps.  The
> requirement is that you have to be able to reboot machines remotely and
> interact with the boot loader, select which kernel to boot, etc.  This is
> impossible unless you have serial consoles.

Now that's interesting. Exactly how does that happen? Each machine has
a modem and phone line? Dialing up on the phone line reboots the machine and
connects the modem to the serial line? Like I said interesting...

> 
> Linux is virtually alone among Unices in not supporting serial consoles,
> and it really needs to be fixed.  They are indispensable.

Tell me more. I do have a couple of machines that I'd like to be able to
boot remotely. However there are no phone lines available to signal the
reboot.

BAJ